Black linework flash design of a stag head with antlers, a moth and overlapping geometric triangles, drawn on layered tracing paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and moth with geometric triangles

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

Several tattoo design sketches are layered on tracing paper, showing a stag head with large antlers, a moth with detailed wings, and a stag head viewed from the front. Overlapping triangles and a circle sit over the drawings as geometric framing. The work is rendered in black ink with fine hatching, stippling and bold outlines, with no colour.

Geometric Stag Deer Antler Moth Triangle Circle Geometric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tracing paper curls at the corners, so you pin it flat with a moth's wing and a chip of roof slate, because the wind through the broken keep lifts anything light. Three sheets now. On the first, the stag turns its head to the left, jaw slack, eyes wide enough to hold the rain. On the second, a moth sits where the stag's brow should be. You copied both from the carvings above the gate at Harrowmere, where the antlers still jut from the stone like the limbs of a drowned tree.

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Your brother said the triangle was a door. He chalked it on the gatehouse flagstones the summer before the roof fell in, three lines meeting at a point nobody could reach without a ladder, and swore that anyone who stood inside it at dusk would see the hall as it had been on feast nights, with tallow smoke rolling under the beams and the stag's head hung above the high table. You laughed at him. You still laugh, mostly, when the owls start up in the chapel and the wind finds the gaps in the glass.

Tonight the light goes early. You stand where the chalk lines used to be, now only a faint stain in the grit, and the moth drops out of the dark and settles on your sleeve, heavy and soft as a folded letter. Its wings are banded like the bark of old oaks. For a moment the hall is lit from the arrow slits, long tables, a fire you can smell, and voices you almost place.

Then the moth lifts, and the hall is only the nave of a ruin, nettles through the flags and the stag's antlers black against the last grey light. You pick up the charcoal and begin the second triangle, the one your brother never finished, pressing so hard the stick snaps in your fingers. Somewhere under the chapel floor, a candle you left burning at noon gutters and goes out.